Monday, June 2, 2008

Loyalty

"Scott, we now know, is disgruntled about his experience at the White House. We are puzzled. It is sad. This is not the Scott we knew," said current White House press secretary Dana Perino, referring of course to her former boss, Scott McClellan.

Au contraire, Ms Perino, Scott McClellan is exactly the brown-nosing, self-serving, power-grubbing little asshole I always thought he was.

As all of you no doubt know, Scott McClellan, former Bush White House press secretary, has followed the well worn path of his ilk and written a book. McClellan's new tell-all memoir, What Happened, was published last week to widespread condemnation - by both stanch Bush White House supporters and basically the other 71% of the American population capable of actually stringing a couple of neurons together. What Happened describes George W. Bush as in a state of "self-deception" and of maintaining a "permanent campaign approach" to the presidency instead of making the best decisions. He didn't out and out say Bush lied about the Iraqi War and the War on Terrorism, but he sure implied it.

Conservatives including the White House, of course, are outraged that McClellan would turn on his former boss in such a manner - calling the memoir "Sour Grapes."

Liberals, of course, are outraged calling it "too little, too late."

Nobody, it seems, likes a traitor.

And McClellan? Scott McClellan is laughing all the way to the bank. His calendar is booked solid, he's been on talks shows, his book is being bashed in every paper across the country, the White House is on his case, people purely hate this guy - and in the tell-all memoir industry you just can't buy publicity like that. It's advertising gold. Amazon is sold out and What Happened is flying off the shelf in the brick and mortar stores.

Really, you've got to admire the shear audacity of this guy. He spent the better part of the last eight years bullshitting the the world as Bush's pet monkey, spinning his little heart out while the White House cranked the handle. While things where going well, he hitched along on Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld's coattails, lapping up the spilled milk of power left behind by men in high places. A proper little sycophantic lickspittle, McClellan demonstrated his undying fealty at every press conference, no matter how batshit insane the message. When the powerful cut loose others around him, McClellan gleefully detailed their failings - never dreaming that the ax would fall on his neck too. He kissed ass and polished Bush's apple and deceived himself into believing that he had a right to the White House's gratitude as a result.

But here's the problem with McClellan's strategy - bullies, no matter if they're the schoolyard variety or of the petty dictator stripe, have no loyalty to anything, especially sycophants. They use people, and they'll discard your ass the minute you become useless. Those who elevate their own self-worth by denigrating and demeaning others, will turn without warning on those who laugh and sneer right along with the joke and think they're part of the inner circle. And this administration has raised that ugly character defect to a high art - starting with Colin Powell and working its way right on down to little pissant dancing monkeys like Scott McClellan.

And true to form, as soon as he was cut loose, McClellan looked around for somebody else to suck up to - and settled on those he had ridiculed and demeaned, the press. With false contriteness he's trying to suck up to us, the America public: he was a fool, a dupe, and pawn. He was deceived, dazzled by Bush's brilliance and charisma. But he sees the light now, oh yes he does.

I'm reminded of another White House mouth piece, Robert McNamara, the arrogant architect of failed Vietnam War policy and the man responsible in large part for 50,000 names on a black marble slab in the Washington D.C. mall. McNamara was one of JFK's whiz kids, and would tolerate no criticism of his boss, either Kennedy nor later Johnson. Next to Jane Fonda, he is arguable the most hated person in America for the Vietnam generation. And true to form, years later he wrote a memoir apologizing for his arrogant unquestioning loyalty to Johnson's insanity. It wasn't his fault, he was deceived and dazzled and duped and blah blah blah, ad nauseam.

If there's any justice in the world, McClellan will be judged by history the same way McNamara is.

A rather large number of folks are calling on McClellan to donate the proceeds of his book sales to Iraqi veterans and their families.

Speaking as an Iraqi veteran myself I say, uh no thanks. Take your money, Monkey Boy, fold it so that it's all sharp corners and shove it up your ass.

13 comments:

  1. I responded to the post in the middle.

    ;-)

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  2. It was the headset. It was making him insane. He posted the exact same thing 3 different times, and still wasn't sure if he pressed Enter!

    Jim, calm down! Quick, get rid of the evidence. It'll all pass real soon now...

    No one will believe Eric or Michelle, and I'll keep my mouth shut. You can depend on me, yes you can!

    Officer, I did not post a comment. why, I didn't even read the post that the comment was supposed to have been posted to, because, you see, the post wasn't there. That wasn't me in the first place. Must have been someone else who didn't comment on the post that wasn't there.

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  3. A mystery is solved: the headset ended up amongst the hats in storage because it wasn't really Jim's headset at all, but a biomechanoid simulacra created by the same aliens who caused the alien runes to appear on the turned bowls Jim made. The aliens stole the actual bluetooth headset, secreting the ersatz headset among the hats, knowing that Jim would hunt everywhere until he found the "headset" and then unthinkingly put it in his ear and--

    --and another mystery is thus created. What are the aliens up to? Are these weird experiments, or are they simply angry that Jim has knocked their favorite television show, V? (Note that the latter explanation would, however, at least narrow our list of suspects to aliens within a roughly 25 light-year radius, max, since the show aired in 1983--this is assuming that the ETs in question can travel in a manner that doesn't violate Relativity or that Relativity is somehow incomplete).

    In any case, I'm not sure whether the headset should be removed or not: while this may seem counterintuitive, we should consider that if the simulacra is physically connected (e.g. by tough, fibrous biomechanoid tendrils), removal might pull chunks of Jim's brain out through his ear. Which would presumably be bad. And if the simulacra is connected in a non-physical way--perhaps electrically or even through some "psychic" connection--removal might be psychologically traumatic and lead to homicidal behavior of some sort.

    I implore anyone out there who owns any of the X-Files box sets to begin researching Jim's obvious problem. Thanks.

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  4. I implore anyone out there to begin researching Jim's obvious problem.

    Hmm...

    (grabs book from shelf and beings flipping through)

    Let's see.... anal-cranial inversion... athlete's tongue ...

    Nope. Doesn't seem to be any of the usual things.

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  5. A combination of 5:00AM blogging, microsoft's Live Writer, and the usual blogger bugs.

    Yep, anal cranial inversion might be it exactly :)

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  6. When the Chinese discover someone behaving badly in government, they shoot him. (OK, they all know that they're all behaving badly, but when someone gets caught and makes them look bad...then they shoot him.)

    When the Japanese discover someone behaving badly in government, they leave him alone long enough for him to kill himself.

    When Americans discover someone behaving badly in government, he gets a fucking book deal. I'm not saying we should be emulating the Chinese and Japanese, but surely there's some middle ground.

    I hate to hold up George Wallace as a great example, but when he apologized for his actions as a segregationist, he didn't make excuses. He just said he'd been wrong (over and over again), and he changed his behavior and policies. I would so stand by some guy who would just fess up (including themselves as part of the problem), and the "sin no more".

    I hadn't put much thought into this whole deal, but I knew there was something making me feel queezy about the whole thing. This asshat isn't even doing the bare minimum by checking into rehab.

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  7. This asshat isn't even doing the bare minimum by checking into rehab.

    Ahahahahahaa!

    Thanks, Nathan, that just killed me.

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  8. Per MWT's suggestion, I found Eric's comment in my email. If he had disagreed with me, I would have just deleted it and pretended ignorance but he began his comment with such penetratingly keen insight I'll be happy to repost it here: :)

    ---------------------

    Excellent points, and an excellent post, Jim.

    I'm not sure I would go as far as the McNamara comparison, though. Not because McNamara doesn't deserve condemnation, but because I think McNamara ultimately did repent and regret. And McNamara, really, had more to repent for when you get down to it: 50,000 dead Americans and the death of Kennedy and Johnson's successors to the New Deal--the New Frontier and Great Society (after all, our failure in Vietnam set the stage for a larger discrediting of liberalism in domestic and international politics, paving the way for Reaganism at home and abroad). McClellan may have abetted one of the worst Presidents in history, but he didn't help bring down two who might have been among the best.

    Too, I think McNamara meant something different when he said he'd been lied to. Military estimates of the ground situation in Vietnam tended to paint a rosy picture--McNamara's fault, actually, was that he wanted to believe those estimates and so he ultimately deceived himself until things were so bad nothing else could be said. In other words, McNamara was a true believer--the exact opposite, in a way, of the cynical and sycophantic McClellan. McNamara can be regarded as a tragic figure in the Shakespearian mode: a man who thought he was doing the right things but instead made terrible choices because (appropriately enough for a tragic figure) of hubris--his overweening vanity in his own intellect and the pride he placed in his office and service. McClellan, as best as I can tell, deserves no such credit. If there is a tragedy to be written of the Bush years, Scott McClellan is at best a Rosencrantz, or a Guildenstern--a minor player who was as a stooge to a Machiavellian villain until his head went on the block.

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  9. And Eric, now that I've read your comment, I agree and wish I had written it. Thanks, excellent points all.

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  10. Wow! to both Jim's post(s) and Eric's insightful response. I feel majorly oogie about the whole "write-a-book-and-make-lot-of-money-after-being-a-wipeass-lickspittle" kind of thing, but you helped me understand why I feel icky.

    As for McNamara, I have to admit that I had to go look him up. I will freely confess that my grasp of history after about 200 BCE is a bit fuzzy (I was a classics major, okay?), and I now spend the majority of my time reviewing clinical trials of medical devices (weird combo, but that's what you get...).

    And Michelle, I love LOVE "anal cranial inversion". You can be sure that it will make its way around my workplace...

    Natalie

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  11. Well, he also trashed the press in his book, for not holding his feet to the fire. Kind of a strange argument to make, but it's in there (I can only comment from listening to discussions of the book as I don't own it, and will probably only read it if I see it in the library and get a wild hair up my bum). This is why he's also getting a cold shoulder from the press (as in the news people). The entertainment people just love it.

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  12. Steve,

    that's correct - he castigated the press for not keeping him honest. He himself apparently had no obligation or responsibility in the matter. He basically said that press secretaries lie to the press all the time and the reporters know that - so they should have pressed (heh) him harder.

    Of course, if you've been watching the clips of McClellan for the last 6 years, you'll see that those White House reporters who hounded him relentlessly weren't White House reporters for long - and they sure didn't get invited to the actual set-piece Bush press conferences.

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